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14 to 17 March 2027 in Palermo, Sicily and online

Each spring the International Forum for Peace, Security & Prosperity brings students, officer cadets, academics and practitioners together in Sicily and online to work through a question that has never had a settled answer: how is peace actually built, and what keeps it standing?

The forum exists because that question is rarely asked in one room. Soldiers, diplomats, scholars and students each hold part of the answer and seldom get to test it against the others. For four days, IFPSP puts them at the same table, on equal footing, with students not as an audience but as participants.

IFPSP 2027 will be held in Palermo.

The 2027 Theme

The security environment has changed faster than the frameworks used to describe it. Geopolitical competition is accelerating. Technology is disrupting how conflicts start, spread and are fought. Climate instability is redrawing where people can live. And trust in the international institutions built to manage all three is eroding.

In this environment, peace can no longer be understood through military or state-centric frameworks alone. Peacebuilding strategies have to account for the interplay of politics, economics and security together, or they stop working.

IFPSP 2027 makes a specific argument: durable peace does not emerge from military superiority. It emerges from the capacity of states, alliances and international organizations to hold three things in balance at once democratic governance, economic resilience, and cooperative security arrangements. Weaken any one and the other two eventually give way.

Four days of keynotes, panels, workshops and student sessions are built around testing that claim rather than assuming it.

Who takes part

IFPSP is deliberately mixed. Military and civilian participants attend together: officer cadets from military academies, university and graduate students, academics and subject-matter experts, peacebuilders, and public safety and defence professionals alongside policymakers, partner organizations and members of the public.

Delegations come from across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. Sessions are designed so that a cadet, a graduate researcher and a serving officer can argue the same point from three different vantages which is usually where the useful part starts.

The programme

Times and speakers will be published closer to the event.

Day one: Arrival and welcome Delegations arrive and register. The forum opens informally with a welcome reception, followed by a dinner of traditional Sicilian food and music. It sounds like a pleasantry; in practice it is where most of the week’s working relationships actually form.

Day two: Opening and academic sessions A formal opening ceremony, a peace ceremony, and the opening keynote set the terms of the week. The academic panel follows, examining the forum’s central argument from the research side. The afternoon is given to the student poster exhibition, where student research is presented, discussed and evaluated.

Day three: March for Peace and workshops The day begins with the March for Peace. The workshop panel follows, and the afternoon splits into parallel breakout sessions, running alongside a dedicated graduate student workshop. This is the most participatory day of the forum smaller rooms, fewer podiums, more argument.

Day four: Closing and recognition A closing keynote, the IFPSP Recognition Awards, and a closing student plenary in which participants not the panellists set out what they take away and what they intend to do with it. The forum closes in the afternoon.

Why Palermo, why Sicily

Sicily is not a backdrop. It is the argument.

On 10 July 1943, Allied forces landed on the island. Within weeks they faced a problem no one had solved at scale: what do you do with a place once you have taken it? Water, electricity, food, courts, police, schools all of it had to function again, under a fascist administration being dismantled in real time, while fighting continued elsewhere on the island.

The answer was the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories, led by Major-General Lord Rennell the first sustained attempt by the western democracies to rebuild a functioning civil state from the ground up. In Palermo, Charles Poletti was assigned in July 1943 to restore civil government in the city before taking on that work across Sicily: restoring water and power, distributing food, and beginning to return a fascist country to democracy. Administration passed back to Italian authorities in February 1944.

That is the whole of the forum’s case, compressed into seven months on one island. Peace is not what happens when the shooting stops. It is what has to be built afterwards deliberately, institution by institution, by people who mostly do not get remembered for it. The IFPSP has previously convened in Sicilian towns along the route of the 1st Canadian Division’s advance, including Agira and Piazza Armerina, in commemoration of those who fought and died there.

There is a fitting symmetry in the main venue. Palazzo Sclafani was built in 1330 on Piazza della Vittoria, facing the Palazzo dei Normanni. Over seven centuries it has been a nobleman’s palace, a hospital, and barracks; today it houses an Italian Army command. The building has spent its entire existence being turned to whatever peace or war required of it next which is more or less what the forum is there to discuss.